Black Gate – Page 937 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Viking Art, Magic, and Wisdom at the British Museum

Wednesday, May 14, 2014 Sean McLachlan Comments 2 comments

The Hunterston Brooch, c. 700, Hunterston, Ayrshire, Scotland. Gold, silver, amber. Diam. 12.2cm.
Runic inscription says, ”Melbrigda owns this brooch.’ Copyright National Museums Scotland.

They journeyed boldly;
Went for gold,
Fed the eagle
Out in the east,
And died in the south
In Saracen land.
— Gripsholm Runestone (AD 1000-1100)

The British Museum has come up with another blockbuster with its new exhibition, Vikings: Life and Legend. Bringing together hundreds of artifacts from around the world, this massive exhibition tells about Norse life, art, and beliefs through everyday objects, works of art, magical objects, and even an entire Viking ship.

There are many surprises. For example, a whalebone axehead from Greenland dating to 1000-1300 AD shows that far-flung Norsemen in harsh regions used whatever material they had at hand. I’m sure the owner of this axehead wanted a real one of iron — the axe appears to have broken at the socket! There are also charming reminders of family life, such as some wooden toy boats from Dublin dating to around 800-1050 AD.

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Vintage Treasures: Marianne, The Magus, and the Manticore by Sheri S. Tepper

Wednesday, May 14, 2014 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

I’ve written a lot of Vintage Treasures articles (over 400 now, believe it or not.) Most of them feature collectible paperbacks and virtually all of them — even the old Ace Doubles from the 1950s — are inexpensive to acquire for the patient collector. It’s very, very rare that I discuss one that costs as much as a new paperback, for example.

Sheri S. Tepper’s Marianne, The Magus, and the Manticore is an exception. Used copies start at $10 – 15 on both Amazon and eBay and copies in good shape will run you closer to $40. It’s not particularly old — published in 1985 — and it’s not even all that rare. So why is it so expensive? Because it was published just before her groundbreaking novel The Gate to Women’s Country (1988) and the Hugo-nominated Grass (1989). In other words, before Tepper became a Big Name in the industry. The book was reprinted once, in 1988, but has now been out of print for nearly 30 years. Tepper has a great many fans, and the law of supply and demand dictates that the volumes in this trilogy are likely to be hot properties for some time.

Legacy Of Magic

Marianne was born to luxury in the tiny nation of Alphenlicht, nestled in the mountains between Turkey and Iraq. The her parents died, leaving control of their fortune to the older brother she fears. Struggling to make her way as a student in America, Alphenlicht seems as unreal as a fairy tale, her childhood there as distant as a dream…

… Until the Magus comes to claim her, and the Black Madame to destroy her, and the Manticore to hunt her down through the streets of another world. For there is magic in the land of Alphenlicht. Magic in Marianne’s blood, and magic in her soul…

Marianne, The Magus, and the Manticore was followed by two sequels in what’s now known as the Marianne series: Marianne, The Madame, and the Momentary Gods (1988), and Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse (1989). A 592-page omnibus volume, The Marianne Trilogy, was offered briefly in paperback by Corgi in 1990 — it’s a great value, if you can find it.

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Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1951: A Retro-Review

Tuesday, May 13, 2014 Matthew Wuertz Comments 4 comments

Galaxy s November, 1951 issue began (as it usually does) with a foreword from the editor, Horace Gold. Gold addresses the purpose of science fiction, stating:

What science fiction must present entertainingly is speculation. Not prophecy, but fictional surmises based on present factors… When a story hits a future development on the head, it should be considered a minor accident; its main job was not to predict but to conjecture what might happen if certain circumstances followed certain lines of development.

Regarding the basic plotlines around science fiction, such as interplanetary flight, time travel, and the like, he writes: “Will these worlds ever exist? They may or may not; it doesn’t matter. The possibility is what counts in science fiction, not the certainty.” He concludes that writers “are examining prospects, pleasant and unpleasant alike, and that, if it produces good stories, is the legitimate province of science fiction.”

“Sea Legs” by Frank Quattrocchi — Robert Craig leaves a life of deep space service to live on Earth. But Robert has never known that world; in fact, he has never known constant gravity. He finds there are many more regulations on Earth than in space and that loyalty to the government is of utmost concern. Soon, Robert ends up breaking rules he never knew existed and he flees into radioactive territory to try to escape incarceration.

It took me some time to get into this story, but by the point Robert is on the run, I was finally rooting for him. I think there was enough setup for this to be the opening chapters of a novel, so it seemed like too much to me.

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Four Modules

Tuesday, May 13, 2014 James Maliszewski Comments 6 comments

One of the many interesting divides among devotees of “old school” roleplaying games, particularly those who favor Dungeons & Dragons, concerns the place of the adventure module. An adventure module is a product detailing a locale to be explored or a situation to be resolved. By many reckonings, the first such module appeared in 1976, written by Pete and Judy Kerestan. Entitled Palace of the Vampire Queen, it described the five-level dungeon inhabited by undead – including the Vampire Queen herself – and other unpleasant things. Held captive within the dungeon is the daughter of a dwarf king, providing a motivation for the characters to become involved beyond glory and gold. While it isn’t notably clever in its conceptions, the module was groundbreaking in that it showed there was market for prefabricated, portable adventures rather than relying solely on the referee’s own efforts. It’s little wonder, then, that modules quickly became a staple of TSR’s catalog, as well as those of other publishers.

The issue some old schoolers take with adventure modules is that they, to borrow Gygax’s famous phrase from Volume 3 of the 1974 edition of D&D, “do … your imagining for you.” More importantly, modules unconsciously establish not only a notion of what an adventure is and ought to be, but they also establish the outlines of a fantasy setting rather than leaving all of these up to each referee to decide for himself and his own campaign. I’m somewhat sympathetic to this point of view, since I know well how powerful an influence TSR’s modules exercised over my own youthful imagination. At the same time, many of these modules served as helpful models to me as I started creating my own dungeons, adventures, and settings. Likewise, they provided a point of commonality between myself and other players, regardless of where they lived or with whom they played. When I met others at local games meets or conventions (or, nowadays, online), we can reminisce about our shared experiences fighting through the Caves of Chaos or the wonders we saw when we first beheld dark fairyland of the Vault of the Drow.

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April Short Story Roundup

Tuesday, May 13, 2014 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 3 comments

April was a good month for swords & sorcery short fiction. Between Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, nine new stories and two poems were published. (I already reviewed two from BCS last month.) Also, a new online magazine, Fantasy Scroll, appeared, promising all sorts of good things. I’ll review the first issue next month.

Swords and Sorcery Magazine #27‘s first of two stories, “Wolves,” is only the second English language story by Brazilian writer Cesar Alcazar. It continues the adventures of renegade Irish swordsman Anrath the Black Hound, whom he first introduced in “A Lonely Grave on the Hill” (HFQ #118).

One night, five brutal mercenaries find themselves together in a “desolate tavern” waiting for a mysterious employer to arrive. Alcazar’s cunning warrior and the nasty conclusion reminded me of Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane stories. Considering his bio says he’s translated Karl Edward Wagner, Robert E. Howard, and George R. R. Martin into Portuguese, I’m not surprised.

The only flaws in the story are some iffy word choices which I attribute to Alcazar writing in English, not his first language. For example, we’re told a man “laid” his cup on a table, though it was clear that the cup was set down on its bottom. Those few minor details aside, this is a clever story.

The second, “The Best Intentions,” is Benjamin Darnell’s first published story. It starts as a somewhat humorous tale of Aidan, student of the apothecarist Edwin, sent out for magical ingredients. It becomes a darker, violent story as things start to go wrong for the young apprentince. It’s a laudable first effort with some thrilling bits, even if its setting is overfamiliar.

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New Treasures: Nebula Awards Showcase 2014, edited by Kij Johnson

Tuesday, May 13, 2014 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

The first volume of the revered Nebula Awards anthologies was released nearly half a century ago, in 1966, and it’s been an annual event ever since. I really can’t think of a single anthology series that’s lasted even half as long.

It’s no accident, either. Year after year these books, which gather Nebula Award-winning short fiction from the previous year — alongside additional nominees, excerpts from winning novels, author retrospectives and appreciations, and survey pieces — collectively form a record of the most acclaimed SF and fantasy our industry has produced for the last 49 years.

Want an example? Have a look at the Tables of Contents for the first three volumes, which contained such stories as “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison, “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” by Roger Zelazny, “Light of Other Days” by Bob Shaw, “The Last Castle” by Jack Vance, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick, “Aye, and Gomorrah…” by Samuel R. Delany, “Behold the Man” by Michael Moorcock, and “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber.

It’s not just that those are some of the most famous SF tales ever written. It’s that the Nebula Awards — and these volumes — helped preserve and promote them and they’re likely the reason you know about these stories today.

All that begs the question: who’s in the latest volume? Who are the writers who will be remembered and acclaimed half a century from today?

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A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 5: The Travesty and the Millennium Era (1996–2004)

Monday, May 12, 2014 Ryan Harvey Comments 9 comments

Hey, kids: guess what comes out in theaters this Friday? Oh, wait … I have something I need to finish up here. (Sorry about the delay. It’s a boring story.)

Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)
Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)
Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)
Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1996)
Addendum: The 2014 Godzilla

Godzilla ‘98: An American Tragedy

Oh, I wish Theodore Dreiser wrote this.

All right, let’s get this mother*&!%ing thing over with as much speed as possible: Godzilla ’98 stinks like rotten Limburger. We can all agree on this. It isn’t the worst film in the Godzilla series, but that’s because it doesn’t belong in the series and has no business associated with anything with the name “Godzilla” on it. It has zero connection to any version of Godzilla, nor does it make any attempt to interpret the monster whose name it crassly exploits — which is probably the most insulting thing about this massive heap of industrial Hollywood sewage.

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“I rolled a critical hit against Yog-Sothoth!”: Revisiting AD&D Deities and Demigods (4th and Final Part)

Monday, May 12, 2014 Nick Ozment Comments 16 comments

I’ve read dozens of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, some of them (“The Rats in the Walls”, “The Colour Out of Space”) multiple times. I’ve studied his seminal essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. But I never have felt compelled to categorize all the various Great Old Ones and Outer Gods and work out their relationships in the overall “mythos” — for one thing, such an undertaking seems to undermine the intent of these Lovecraftian horrors, which was to represent the awful unknown.

August Derleth was among the first to go about classifying Lovecraft’s monsters in any systematic way, which tended to morph the work from pure horror into something more like metaphysical science fiction. Some fans have also criticized Derleth for using a Judeo-Christian framework for his classification, creating a dualistic good-versus-evil overlay that would be anathema to Lovecraft’s own worldview. The dissonance of this theme with the source texts threatened to jettison the original intent: conveying the cosmic terror of the mystery of existence and our precarious place in it.

Plugging Lovecraft’s cast of cosmic creeps into a Dungeons & Dragons pantheon and assigning stats to them (hit points, armor class, etc.) — as the 1980 first edition of Deities and Demigods did — seems vulnerable to this criticism to the utmost degree. Here are these totally foreign, otherworldly entities — and here’s how you defeat them! But it’s human nature. We love stats. We have to classify, categorize, label, and collate. It’s an inevitable progression that tends to water down the capacity of classic monsters to frighten (we’ve worked out how you destroy a vampire — stake to the heart, full exposure to sunlight — or put down a werewolf — silver bullet — or stop a zombie — head shot — so exhaustively that we have to come up with new variations and altogether new monsters to keep readers on the edge of their armchairs).

Still, I gotta admit it’s kinda fun to see what the game designers thought Cthulhu’s class levels should be, or how many hit points might be possessed by Nyarlathotep. If you’re going to introduce these beings into the hack ‘n slash realm of D&D, it’s bound to happen.

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“All Folk Cherished Their Legends”: Phyllis Ann Karr’s Wildraith’s Last Battle

Monday, May 12, 2014 Matthew David Surridge Comments 2 comments

Wildraith's Last Battle A little while ago, I wrote here about Phyllis Ann Karr’s 1986 novel At Amberleaf Fair. I thought it was well-written and inventive, quietly doing highly distinctive things with the fantasy genre without drawing attention to its own originality. I recently read another book by Karr, 1982’s Wildwraith’s Last Battle, and found it was different from Amberleaf Fair while also sharing many of its virtues: tight prose, clever plotting, a strong sense of character, and a tremendously well-constructed setting. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s well worth discussing here.

Set in the southern hemisphere of an unknown world, a group of iron-age nations have begun a complex three-sided war. Meanwhile, for reasons unrelated to the war, one woman loses everything and curses the god, Wildrava, that she believes is responsible. The result is that the god incarnates as a (more-or-less) human female named Wildraith and tries to seek out the woman who cursed her — but the woman, Ylsa, is finding her own way among the shifting sides of the ongoing war. Despite herself, Wildraith finds herself becoming a key player in the war as she strives to find Ylsa and break the curse.

The book is, to use recently-developed terminology, both grim and dark. Violence, including sexual violence and torture, is an element of the story’s reality and occasionally described in detail. There’s nothing ostentatious in the novel’s depiction of violence, though, nothing exploitative or false. It’s a part of the tone and world and feels earned without forcing the whole book into depressive bleakness. Ultimately, what makes the novel remarkable is its ability to fuse matter-of-fact description of day-to-day activities with the experience of war and also a distinctively fantastic sense of wonder: a feeling of the numinous that comes from gods involving themselves in the affairs of mortals.

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The Fantasy of Lucius Shepard: A Handbook of American Prayer

Monday, May 12, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Lucius Shepard died on March 18 and, to commemorate his profound contributions to fantasy, we are surveying his books here. Today, we continue with a short novel with a fascinating premise: A Handbook of American Prayer.

Wardlin Stuart is in prison for manslaughter when he begins to write letters to God. He soon finds that his prayers are answered — all of them. Wardlin seems to have accidently stumbled on the correct way to supplicate God… or, at least, a god. But when he publishes his prayers, he sets himself up for a confrontation with a powerful fundamentalist minister. And in the meantime, God appears to have arrived on Earth…

A man walks into a bar. A dispute ensues, and the bartender kills him. He’s sentenced to ten years for manslaughter. In prison, the convict, Wardlin Stuart, writes prayers addressed to no god in particular. Inexplicably, his prayers — whether it’s a request for a girlfriend or a special favor for a fellow inmate — are answered, be it in days or weeks. When his collection of supplications, A Handbook of American Prayer, is published by a New York press, Stuart emerges a celebrity author. Settling into a new life in Arizona, he encounters a fundamentalist minister. The two are destined for a confrontation. In the interim, it seems that the god to whom Stuart has been praying has manifested himself on the earth. In this short novel about America’s conflicting love triangle — celebrity, spirituality, and money — Shepard negotiates the thin line between the real and the surreal, expounding upon violence and redemption along the way. This story of an unlikely American messiah shows why The Wall Street Journal has compared Shepard, an award-winning author, to Graham Greene, Robert Stone, and Ward Just.

We previously discussed Shepard’s acclaimed collection The Dragon Griaule and his vampire novel, The Golden.

A Handbook of American Prayer was published by Thunder’s Mouth Press on September 14, 2004. It is 272 pages in hardcover. A trade paperback edition was published simultaneously. Both are out of print; there is no digital edition.